There’s a joke about all Windows related problems being solvable by turning the computer off and on again. It’s one of the things that works most reliably about the OS. Well, even this has been broken by Microsoft in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.
When you get to the point where you have more than a dozen virtual desktops running with many different programs, your computer (not to mention your brain) will start to get overloaded. At times like these, I just want to hit refresh (to coin a phrase…) and get back to an unmussed system. However, a new “feature” in the Fall Creators Update of Windows 10 will try to reopen as many of the programs that you had running beforehand as possible. Not all programs will get restarted. Tiny programs like Notepad++ stay unloaded, but bloated behemoths that hang for 30 seconds to a minute to load (like Excel and Visual Studio) get restarted, maybe with the files that you had opened, maybe not. If you were using virtual desktops beforehand and had carefully separated your programs by task, all the programs will be in the first one but you will still have several empty and useless virtual desktops open. Instead of getting a fresh start on a clear desktop, you are left waiting for programs to load and needed to close all the virtual desktops. Unfortunately, there’s no setting to just turn off this rather half-baked behaviour.
However, a little PowerShell can reduce the pain and shutdown the computer more thoroughly.
I don’t want to accidentally trigger this, so my script starts with a confirmation:
Write-Output "This will close all your virtual desktops and shutdown the computer." $Confirm = Read-Host "Hit Y to confirm." if ($Confirm.ToLower() -ne 'y') { Write-Output "Doing nothing" exit } Write-Output "Shutting down..."
Closing all the other virtual desktops can be achieved with by wrapping around MScholtes’ VirtualDesktop:
while ($true) { $CountCommand = "$($VirtualDesktopExe) /C" $CountOutput = iex $CountCommand if ($CountOutput -match 'Count of desktops: (\d+)') { $Count = $Matches[1] if ($Count -gt 1) { Write-Output "You still have $($Count) virtual desktops." iex "$($VirtualDesktopExe) /R" } else { Write-Output "Only one virtual desktop at this point" break } } else { Write-Error "Unable to parse result of command '$($CountCommand)': '$($CountOutput)'" exit } }
This simply invokes the program with the “/C” flag (count) then calls the program with “/R” (remove) until only one virtual desktop remains.
After that, the script just invokes the old fashioned shutdown command from Ramesh Srinivasan’s article above about this new feature.
shutdown.exe /s /t 0
On my desktop, I have a link to a script that invokes the PowerShell script with the location of the VirtualDesktop.exe file on my machine:
PowerShell -command "F:\Robert\Dropbox\local-scripts\_Common\CloseVirtualDesktopsAndShutdown.ps1 -VirtualDesktopExe F:\Robert\Dropbox\executables\Windows\x64\VirtualDesktop.exe"
Now I know that I will get a fresh start when I turn on my computer again. I’m not really sure why this isn’t the default behaviour.